It began on July 8th, 1999 with a peaceful
demonstration in Tehran, Iran. But by the end of the week,
the Islamic Republic was responsible for the killing of several
students, the disappearance of dozens of others, and thousands of
arrests. There was mass rioting in the streets and Iran was
thought to be on the brink of some kind of new student
revolution.
But alas, the government was not going to have
it. Indeed, it was a government born out of a revolution
itself only twenty years before. They now had the guns, they
now had the jails, and they now had the money. That's all it
usually takes to control an uprising of an unarmed people with no
organized resistance. It was only ten years before that the
world witnessed the Chinese put down of protestors in a much more
disturbing way at Tiananmen Square, where they mercilessly
slaughtered thousands of people.
Today's story in Iran is really a story of what
might have been. What if the American government had allowed
or even encouraged Iranian American citizens to support an armed
resistance for democracy in Iran? What if the U.S. government
had learned and actually reacted to that mini revolution in 1999 to
support a regime change movement?
But they didn't. The Clinton years, whose
foreign policy consisted mainly of hands-off bombing campaigns,
were winding down without apparent interest in revisiting policy on
Iran. A few years earlier, in April 1995, President Bill
Clinton had issued a complete embargo on all dealings with Iran,
prohibiting any commercial and financial transactions with
Iran. These blanket restrictions along with further sanctions
against countries dealing with Iran proved to be as far as the U.S.
government was willing to go with Iran policy. Creative foreign intervention had become a thing
of the past for the United States, at least when it
came to Iran, and civilians in Tehran were left to be forever on
their own.
The neo
conservative faction in America likely had some kind of different
idea. Perhaps they imagined supporting armed resistance on
both sides of Iran’s borders in now U.S. occupied Iraq and
Afghanistan. Of course, that was to be stifled by a
multi-year military entanglement in both
countries.
And
that’s where we are today. It is an Iranian nation with
no alternative government solution with its people fighting for a
so-called democracy within a ruling theocracy; fighting for at best
a rollback from a radical powerless religious president to a
moderate powerless religious president – a similar government
to what they had for eight years under Mohammad
Khatami.
It is an epic
failure of American foreign policy intervention. There has
been, in fact, no intervention at all. It is not only a
tragedy for the Iranian youth full of hope yearning for a 21st
century government, but a policy mistake that has led to a
continuation of this extremist regime in Iran. Now would have
been the time for armed resistance in Iran to chase out the
Mullahs. Instead, the American government is left powerless
amid sporadic nationalist protests and Islamic chants. An
Iranian government overthrow and a secular democracy is still a
long way away without an organized fully funded democratic
opposition group. Only now can we hope that this time,
American foreign policy on Iran will begin to anticipate the
opportunity for democratic intervention. American values are
the right values, especially when a people are loudly demonstrating
their preference for those values in the face of arrests, torture
and death.